122217-an-apology-to-the-dev-team-and-the-people-who-fix-bugs
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Please put up RELEVANT sites thank you. glasdoor is simply loaded with negative feedback about any company, even the one where I work. It's like a cesspit for fired employees. | |} ---- Yea but Carbine's all makes good sense though, lol | |} ---- Actually, the one for ArenaNet is loaded with a lot of truth. It helps if you actually read the reviews; it's pretty easy to separate whining from dissatisfaction. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Do your hospitals go without key features for months, while also making design changes and construction that adversely affect other parts of your hospital? Does your hospital discriminate between patients, blatantly providing more privileges to certain ones, over others? Does your hospital allow players to defraud your billing because they fall under a certain privilege category? Is your hospital accessible to all people? Or just moderately healthy people that get sick sometimes? Does your hospital properly communicate between departments? Does your hospital promise changes to patient care / infrastructure, then make those changes while also making things worse for other patients / infrastructure? | |} ---- I'd be willing to bet he has no control over whether these things do or don't happen. | |} ---- Yes, in ways. During construction, we have to maintain key features, but several will change. The hospital we're planning phasing on right now will need to relocate the main entrance to one used by the paediatrics wing. This will, essentially, mean that the mothers and children entry will cease to exist in concept as the main entry inconveniences the current patients. There is no less intrusive way to do it, though, construction cannot continue until that entry is closed and an active construction area needs to be isolated, especially in a hospital where it is an infection control issue. That's just what I'm working on right now. That kind of thing has to happen during construction. Billing, you might have to ask since that's not a part of architecture. There's certainly a lot of insurance fraud and denial going on, so yes, that happens. The hospital is accessible to everyone up to the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the standards of health care, but immobile patients and emergency patients must still pay extra for an ambulance to take them to the hospital. Health care also still costs money. Departments communicate through the hospital, however, the people in the surgery wing do not understand the architectural considerations that happen under their feet. There are issues where med gas has to be parsed out because the container storage being in a central location was simply creating a crisis where a department would take too many canisters. It is only with this latest phase of development that the problem will be sorted by creating med gas storage at the same location on every floor. And yes, the promised emergency department expansion will send imaging to another floor, meaning patients will have to travel farther from the main entry to get there. Design is hard, Eclips. Nothing in huge-scale design projects like this is a clean process. It's messy, it has to take in the needs and opinions of hundreds of different groups of people and form it into the best possible consideration for design, often with quite a long time in the process of construction. This "phase" of construction we're doing is the second, has been two years in design, will constitute six different building permits, and will take a minimum of two years to build, all the while requiring temporary construction to go on to maintain basic functionality. Not everybody always wins everything and yes, we do have departmental head doctors from specific departments throwing hissy fits about who got a "bigger" office or a "better" procedure room, whether or not those rooms are or are not objectively bigger or better. I can't just wave a magic wand and the hospital is suddenly bigger in every department, everything is better, and everyone is happy. I wish I could, but if it was that easy, anyone could do it. | |} ---- ---- Hehe, love it :) | |} ---- I wouldn't even go nearly that far. Hell, there's a giant brick wall hidden in the walls causing structural issues at my last project. No one thought to ask what was causing the sag. It's actually the old exterior wall, there's a massive masonry wall from the 1950s in a hospital I worked on that was seriously supported by stud walls. How come it went unnoticed for so long, despite the issues it was causing? Because nobody knew it was there; nobody had to penetrate that wall until we came along with a complete backfill of the area. We didn't even know about it; it wasn't in the survey. Nobody even knew a two-and-a-half foot think brick-and-speedblock wall was floating two floors off the ground and running almost half the length of that particular building, putting strain on the steels since they added another floor on top of the old one. It can't even be removed now. It's so ingrained in the new structure that to demolish it would be an entire renovation, we'd have to knock out walls all the way up to the second to last floor up on both sides, demolish it from the top down, and that work in and of itself would shut down smoke compartments of all those floors and departments. Not to mention that we'd have to figure out how to replace the wall and its fire rating, if any. It runs alongside a few maintenance shafts and, of course, wraps around the concrete support columns that are embedded in the speedblock. In the end, we just put up a lintel and some additional steel. It'll have to stay there until the next time the floors are totally redone, which might be another twenty years. The problem with your quote there is that last part. If you're in the field of design, you've just made a huge mistake. You NEVER, as a designer, wonder who thought it was a good idea, why it took as long as it did to recognize the problem, because that is absolutely inconsequential as a designer. I don't need to know who enclosed that exterior wall in the first place, who chopped through it and didn't take the necessary structural steps (if they even knew it was there through the slab, because it was probably a completely different architect), who didn't note it on any of the as-built drawings, nor why the construction manager at the hospital, who coordinates all of this, didn't know it was there. I don't need to know because that doesn't fix the problem. There are only three steps in good design. Understand the problem, design a plan of action, fix the problem the best way possible. Period. Yes, it may inconvenience people. It may not be the most thorough solution; it may take years to actually complete. Let people who know better work out lawsuits, firings, and hirings; they're absolutely useless to the actual hospital itself because every single one of these steps could have been taken completely innocently. Witch hunts aren't a part of the design process. You just have to recognize what your issue is, what your possible solutions are, and what limitations you're facing in those solutions. No, it's not always a pleasant process and it isn't something I can easily make the lay person understand. Most people only see from the audience's seat, they aren't really aware of how huge design projects like this work. People might wonder why a door opens up to see a toilet in one of the rooms I was talking about, since it's not standard practice to put the toilet on the latch side of a door. It's ugly to see the toilet first, why do that? Don't they teach us better? Yes, there's a steel plate overhead that won't accept thru-penetrations and the toilet has to be where it is. It's not optimal, but you can't make everything optimal, especially not immediately. | |} ---- ---- ---- 100% agree. The other day, my brother said something to me along the lines of, "I paid for the game, I should be able to play it how I want." This logic is absolutely mad. That's like picking up a game, seeing the words, "For 2-4 players," then buying it thinking you can play single player because you spent money on it. This is exactly why I have a habit of telling people that I don't think MMOs are for them. I don't think the majority of people playing MMOs actually want an MMO, and when they get one it makes them angry that they need other people to play a multiplayer game. Your $15/month does not give you god status nor does it entitle you to whatever game you delusionalized in your head. It entitles you to play the game you paid for. Also, not saying I don't believe those reviews, but I do find it suspicious that the majority of them came right around the same time as Carbine's massive layoffs. We can find as much truth in bitterness and spite as we can in advertising. Don't believe everything you read. | |} ---- ---- I have a lot of issues with this post. The most important one being that I'm not entirely sure why we need to care who did what on this project that we considered to be a fire-able offense, not that somebody should. It's certainly not helping us to get pitchforks and torches and go screaming to Carbine for justice when that doesn't fix the core problems we have. I'm certainly not about to presume that everything anyone has ever disliked about the game should be a nuclear option issue. A lot of games have PVP systems that fail or don't deliver, but people still play them because people still play them. Wildstar's biggest complaint I've heard in PVP is just a low population in the queues, which Carbine can only indirectly control. I think Wildstar could change to a better PVP system, but it seems a bit presumptuous to say with hindsight that, obviously, they had no idea what they were doing. They seemed to have a pretty good idea of what they were doing, it just isn't realistic in the new frame of the game. They need something that scales better to population shifts. That's not a reason to set up the guillotine and go looking for the bourgeoisie. Take, for example, this.... This is intentional hyperbole, but it's even worse coming from a huge and fundamental misunderstanding of how the entire process of architecture works. First of all, this can't even be done in any non-private building for any reason anymore, it doesn't meet the code. Second, you're assuming a singular means of egress, which is also illegal. In both cases, the plans examiner wouldn't have given out a building permit, which is required to even begin construction. It would have failed the fire marshall's examination after the core construction even if it did, and it would certainly fail again anyway. This is assuming that, for some reason, the physical therapy head hadn't already seen the life safety information and raised this. I mean, you were trying to be hyperbolic, but you don't even know how ridiculous that all is because you don't know every layer this thing has to go through to get to a permit and beyond, and I only listed the most basic and obvious. To some people, this might be witty repartee. To me, knowing what I know, this is like saying, "A better example would be Carbine not giving you a game, then simply taking your money and forcing you to subscribe for the rest of your life whether you like it or not." To you, it might seem related, but the issues in PVP aren't even remotely related to doing something outright illegal that actually can't be built without intensive government involvement on at least four or five different levels. You may as well be suggesting Carbine chew the gypsum off the walls and build an outhouse on the main thoroughfare in another city. It's not your fault; you aren't in architecture. To you, those seem similar. They're simply not. You can, in fact, still PVP. At worst, Carbine designed a surgery suite with more rooms than patients to fill them. It's nowhere near that bad. PVP can, in fact, still happen and does, but it was built on a larger scale. None of which, of course, has much to do with bugs. I mean, even in your quote, you say, "However, in software, if you pull out the old brick wall and the whole build crumbles, then you simply use the old build." You then say, it's probably less black and white, which... yes, you literally just disproved your own point and tried to gloss it over! My software coding background ended something like ten years ago, and even I know that you can't just say, "Well, use the old one" for everything. Software is cross-referential, you can't just plug WoW's old raiding system into their new game with a Ctrl+C. The code that makes these all work together is where most of the bugs come from. Not to mention, the old build is why we apparently need improvements in the first place. The old build is the initial condition problem, it'd be like me fixing the wall, seeing it might interfere with some plumbing on the next floor up, and then saying, "actually, put it back in broken again, and adapt it so it works with all the new improvements around it." That's a fabulously bad use of resources. It would be absolutely shocking if Carbine spent the next few months trying to roll back to an older build for PVP just because DS gear currently can outperform PVP gear. That's a temporary development situation. Again, it's not your fault for thinking so, it seems so easy to just plug in and roll back. It's just not that easy in real life. Large scale game design, just like large-scale architecture, is a hugely complex undertaking that has to be understood from the ground up, or it's not understood at all. That's why it's easy to pinpoint specific things that make you say, "Why was that done that way, it doesn't make sense!" but does once you actually understand what's going on. Saying, "Why does DS gear have to be better than PVP gear!" is pretty clear, it's because it's not meant to be for long, but Carbine has to do these changes in phases. They couldn't wait to get the PVP fixes all in place to get out the itemization changes. Or "Why can Carbine close the renown train so quickly but it takes so long to add currencies to PVP!" is also pretty clear, it's because changing for tuning purposes is simply a matter of changing values you've already got an evaluation on, while adding currencies to new places is harder and has to be balanced against other methods of earning currency (particularly in PVP, where your opposition and you can do things like win-trade to exploit and Carbine gets torched every time one is discovered). That would take planning, research, and time. Changing a wall during planning is a lot easier than changing it during construction, even if it takes the same Imagine if everything anyone ever thought wasn't perfect about your work was assumed to be a measure of your incompetence instead of the nature of your work and the conditions you work within. When I was 15 and working as a cart attendant at Target, I already knew better. When hanger bins overflowed, I already could tell my managers that taking a load of hangers to the back was simply a lower priority that didn't get filled when the store was busy. I also didn't simply assume they were idiots for not scheduling someone to do just hangers or to move them to the front. Those have very easily explainable reasons for why they wouldn't be done. They're not optimum for me, but the world doesn't revolve around me and what I think I need to do my job, it has to function as a store first. It's only worse in architecture, where apparently what I do is an arcane science and the idea that I need to jog walls to maintain an 8 foot corridor and a minimum exam room size isn't easily apparent, I'm just making things more complicated apparently because I don't know what I'm doing. It's part of why I tend to defend Carbine from the same claims. Maybe they really don't know what they're doing, it's possible, but nobody in these forums is capable of making that judgement call. It sounds like what happens when someone walks up to a returns desk and demands to know why the store can't take back a dress she bought six months ago without a receipt. "It's obviously from here!" I recall them saying. "Yes," I'd have to say, "but that's not the reason I can't take this back and give you full price." Sometimes, people don't want to deal with the reality of the situation they exist in. You're actually a lot better at that than many of your peers, which is why I also defend you when they call you a troll or unrealistic. I don't believe that; there's just a lot I don't understand about PVP and the specific niche you specialize in. At the same time, neither of us runs code at Carbine, so while I give your suggestions a lot of weight, I trust Carbine with their implementation. There's a lot in the things that are easy for us to ask for that, in practice, would require enormous changes to the code. Either way, Carbine is already trying to adapt to changing needs, but it's not an easy process. This entire post is about having too much to do and not enough time to do it in with the people you have, and that is common throughout design, especially on long-term projects like an MMORPG. I have a lot of respect for Carbine possibly because of my background, I think they simply have to change their game to give us what we need right now, hopefully without making things worse later if the game's demographics and conditions change again. Bugs are simply going to happen, there's one I'm reporting right now in regards to housing. I can't sit here and just assume Lamenth and co. are incompetent, or if I'm a solitary or rare glitch, or that this should have never happened. I just am not in a position to know if that's the case. All I do know is that there's an issue, I have a workaround, I'd like a solution, and I hope it gets fixed soon without ruining the work I've done so far. But I'm not on Carbine's staff, so I have to give them the feedback they need, then step back and let them do their jobs knowing that my housing glitch might not be in the next hotfix. I'm assuming PVP is going to take the lion's share of development time post-Drop 4. | |} ---- This is so completely not true I don't know how to respond. The number one killer of quality is deadlines. And in fact, the best way to make a project take longer and have more bugs is to impose aggressive deadlines. And design process is, well, pretty dang important. You can't just go write "quality code" and expect it to work as part of the whole system without a good process. People who try are the worst people to have on your team. Believe me, at the end of the day you do what you are told, even if it results in a sub-par product. The number of developers shackled into making poor decisions by other people is astronomical. It's one of the major reasons that Agile done will is so good. But Agile is rarely done well. | |} ---- The biggest misconception people have about software is that it is malleable- easily changeable. In fact, this is only true for the best written software, which rarely exists in the real world, espcially on big team. And from what we've seen, WS doesn't have the most stable code base. | |} ---- I really do take those into consideration. Maybe we should revise it to, "thanks all you developers that got stuck trying to make bad code better," and "screw all of you other guys," lol. | |} ---- As far as we've seen, I don't think another two people have put more heart and soul into this game than TT and Pappy. I'm sure they have some amazing people on their teams as well, so a big 'thank you' to them, too. The work TT has done with raids and the level of care he shows for the overall product of the game has made me a loyal fan. At this point, I'm willing to try anything he works on. Keep it up, yo! | |} ---- . I literally do game QA for a living. It's not an easy job. Saying that a developer can just "make quality" is the biggest, most untrue thing I've ever heard. A developer can make a quality IDEA, but once it's implemented it's not just going to be 100% golden and sparkly and problem free. It still needs to go through approvals, implementation, quality assurance, revision after quality assurance, re-implementation, feature greenlight, focused consumer testing, pre-release, and finally live release. Each of those comma-separated situations have about 10-15 smaller and more menial steps to them. Other posters have said it better: You can't just "make a change" in a game. I've said this so many times I'm pretty sure I should just tattoo it on my forehead so all I need to do is move my bangs to tell people the obvious truth. Edited February 11, 2015 by BusterCasey | |} ---- You're right. Wildstar was unable to shine through despite all of these suggested management problems ... ??? Come on man | |} ---- If that's literally all you meant to say, you worded it badly. EDIT: To clarify, what a lot of us read when you said "devs can make quality no matter what management says" was "if they just do it it'll be fine." I can tell you from personal experience that management can turn a great dev idea into a steaming pile of waste through deadlines, mismanagement and lack of insight into the game. All it takes is one director missing a review meeting and showing up 2 weeks later with additional change requests AFTER the lockdown date to turn Well Made Content Package A into Buggy, Unresponsive Content Heap B. | |} ---- Check my edit; I didn't word MY post too great either. | |} ---- Or your bias / personal feelings toward it cause you to take things harder than they're meant to be /shrug | |} ---- Yep- wherever TT goes, I'm gonna give it a try. But for the moment I hope he sticks around for WS a bit longer :) | |} ---- Of course, everyone is a pro in telling on anonymous site which review is made by trustful employee, and which one is biased and made by upper management. 2015, people still trust everything on a web. | |} ---- It really does help if you read all of the reviews. You'll notice a lot of them say the exact same thing in different words, but then there's one that even other reviews are like, "wtf?" | |} ----